This is part #2 in my response to Michael's original questions: "What is it about the kernel of a story that hooks you? How do you go about envisioning a larger story? What is it that makes you conclude that you want to write the full story (book, play, etc.)? Aside from my intrigue with this question, I think the answers can shed some light on how what we call "aesthetics" is incorporated in the actual making or developing of a work."
I wrote that first produced play, ENDPAPERS, after my pair of theater "insiders" read an earlier script, and declared it too chancy. It was called PROBLEM PLAY. The insiders said I should write something more orthodox, easily accessible, with an engaging story, some humor maybe, and a likable ending with everyone getting their just deserts. The point was to prove I could sell tickets. Then maybe producers would take a chance on PP. Given its assignment, ENDPAPERS, proved "serviceable". It drew "selling" reviews, ran for almost five months, and had the largest cumulative audience of any Off-Broadway play that year. There were two or three moments when I found myself as the megaphone for characters' "souls", but in large part I was simply designing, molding, and polishing pieces for a well-constructed story. In response to Michael's question, I'll describe the "chancy" PROBLEM PLAY, and why I was hooked by the idea. As I've mentioned, PP itself ran into two problems before it ever got to a producer. PP's "story" was based on a real-life event. Marilyn Vos Savant (whose "Ask Marilyn" is the world's most widely-read column!) had answered a question about the famous Monty Hall problem. She received ten thousand letters from teachers, math professors, even astro-physicists, telling her she was wrong. It made the front page of the New York Times. As I turned the much-discussed event over in my mind, I saw it had two elements I could exploit theatrically -- an arrogant, very, very smart guy who is nevertheless not as smart as he would project, and an intriguing, novel, central conceit. The conceit is this. In the first act we see - among many other things -- the professor irrefutably proving to a silly, bimboesque CBS interviewer that Marilyn is wrong. In reaction to the interviewer's persistent stupidity, he does get obnoxious, but it's clear to everyone in the audience he is right. In the second act, everything gets turned upside down. We learn that the "bimbo" is not only smart but cunningly vicious, and the professor -- and the entire audience -- have been wrong. I needed a story in which to embed the conceit, and the one that came to me was a father-daughter play. The father was a professor of mathematics, the daughter was damaged in some way, and the story hinged on a mathematical problem. The insiders said, "Are you nuts? Mathematics on a stage?! Not possible." So I shelved it, and went off to write the recommended "popular" ENDPAPERS. Meantime, while I was writing ENDPAPERS, David Auburn's PROOF appeared. It was a father-daughter play, he's a math professor, the daughter is damaged in some way, and the story hinges on a mathematical problem. With PROOF's arrival, the idea that ENDPAPERS would prepare producers to take on my "adventurous" PROBLEM PLAY would no longer work. Producers would feel, "That's been done!" PROOF and PP were very, very different, but no matter -- it would sound too much like PROOF. It stayed shelved. So I spent the next couple of years writing two more plays, alternating time between them. During that period, the forced shelving of PP was turning out to be a good thing for me. It was my first play, and, like most beginning "creators", as I went on writing I was learning things. I still wanted each play to be a good story, but I gradually became more and more concerned with exposing the minds and hearts of my characters. I began to revise PP. I saw the conceit -- "cute" coup de theatre though it was -- and the depiction of an obnoxious guy being brought down, were not enough -- for tv maybe, but not for theater, or for me. The math and the conceit would stay, but the extraordinary daughter's mysterious "damage" eventually emerges. For me, the play grew into something not about a mere tricky probability problem and misplaced arrogance. And not solely about a problem restricted to my lead characters. It's about a problem almost all of us have: Our limitations, what they do to our dreams, and what we do to live with them. In my first posting on this sub-thread, I remarked to Michael that, while working on only one piece, we may nevertheless "choose the subject" over and over again -- until the final work is very different from what we initially embarked on. I'd be interested to hear how often visual artists on our forum have experienced this. And how often they can perceive in the surviving pre-execution sketches for great works of the past an evolution into something quite altered from the artist's evident first idea. Meantime a somber thing occurred in my "career": Both the agent and producer I'd had from the beginning of ENDPAPERS died -- while my two new plays and the revision of PP were still in unfinished drafts. ************** Plan your next getaway with AOL Travel. Check out Today's Hot 5 Travel Deals! (http://travel.aol.com/discount-travel?ncid=emlcntustrav00000001)
